Premier Quits in Face of New Beirut Clashes

The Lebanese government resigned Wednesday in the face of what Premier Rashid Karami called “a horrific nightmare”--the savage house-to-house fighting between rival militias for control of Muslim West Beirut.

At least 29 people were reported killed and 120 wounded in the worst fighting in the Lebanese capital in more than a year, officials at area hospitals said. The battle capped three weeks of factional combat, centered first in the southern port of Sidon, in which well over 100 people have been killed.

“What has happened is a horrific nightmare,” said Karami, a 63-year-old Sunni Muslim, who agreed to stay on in a caretaker role.

Karami, a lawyer and political leader from the northern city of Tripoli, agreed a year ago to support the efforts of President Amin Gemayel, a Maronite Christian, by leading a “national unity” government that included all the factions that are now fighting. It was an effort to end the political chaos that has plagued Lebanon for years.

Amal Militia Defied

The new fighting for West Beirut began at dusk Tuesday when the mostly Sunni Muslim fighters of the Murabitoun militia tried to open an office in a residential district in direct defiance of the dominant Shia Muslim militia Amal.

Walid Jumblatt, the Druze warlord and Cabinet minister for public works, joined his forces with Amal in nightlong machine gun and rocket duels with the Murabitoun fighters that spread throughout the Muslim sector.

At one point the fighting swirled around the Canadian Embassy in West Beirut’s main shopping district. Diplomatic sources said staff members would remain on duty, but their families were being evacuated to the Christian port of Juniyah, north of the capital.

American diplomatic activity, which has been conducted from Ambassador Reginald Bartholomew’s residence in the East Beirut suburb of Yarze, was apparently not hampered by the fighting.

By mid-morning Wednesday, the Amal militiamen and their Druze allies drove Murabitoun fighters from their headquarters in the Corniche Mazraa district, ransacking and burning the building. The fighting then seemed to taper off with the Amal and Druze forces clearly in control.

‘Murabitoun Finished’

“The Murabitoun are finished forever,” said a bearded Amal fighter, who was draped with ammunition belts and carried an assault rifle.

One Western diplomat, who spent most of the night seeking refuge in his bathroom, said, “The Murabitoun put up a terrible fight. . . . They were some of the hardest and dirtiest fighters in Beirut and showed it.”

Much of the headquarters fighting raged around the Gamal Abdel Nasser Mosque, where the Murabitoun maintained a radio station.

At a nearby orphanage that was riddled by gunfire, about 2,000 children, some of them handicapped, were trapped for several hours.

The orphanage director, Meriland Akkad, said the children, ages 1 to 16, were “terrified, crying and screaming,” but no one was hurt.

In an emotional five-minute radio address to his fragmented nation, Karami said that Amal’s campaign against the Murabitoun, its former ally in battles against Christian militias, was “colossally dangerous.”

“No one can justify what is happening in our capital, Beirut . . . To apologize to you, brothers, for what has happened, I tender to you and to Beirut the resignation of the national-unity Cabinet,” he added.

OKs Caretaker Role

The premier then telephoned his resignation to Gemayel at the president’s residence in suburban Baabda. Local radio stations said that Gemayel asked Karami to stay on as caretaker until a new government can be formed and that Karami agreed.

Gemayel consulted by telephone for an hour with Syrian President Hafez Assad about Karami’s resignation, the radio stations reported without elaboration.

Syria, which has thousands of troops in the Bekaa Valley, became the major power broker in Lebanon after the U.S. peacekeeping effort ended in February, 1984. Assad backed the national unity government that Karami formed on April 30, 1984.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Bernard Kalb said the resignation “comes at an untimely moment. The United States deeply regrets the bloodshed that has occurred in West Beirut.”

“It has been our consistent goal to have in Lebanon a central government able and willing to exert control over all Lebanese territory,” he said. “We urge that all parties in Lebanon exert themselves toward this end.”

Karami’s resignation signals yet another political crisis in Lebanon, which is occupied by Syrian troops in the east, Israeli troops in the south and is under local control elsewhere by warlords rather than the central government.

Israelis Attack Bekaa

As the premier announced his resignation, Israeli warplanes made their sixth attack in Lebanon this year. The military command in Tel Aviv said its jets bombed a Palestinian guerrilla base northwest of the Bekaa Valley town of Barr Elias, six miles west of the Syrian-Lebanese border, scoring direct hits.

Israeli military sources, who spoke on condition on anonymity, said the target was a headquarters of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist group led by Nayef Hawatmeh that has the support of the Soviet Union. Neither the Israeli command or Lebanese media, in reporting the attack, mentioned casualties.

Israeli troops also sealed off the Shia Muslim village of Shahrour east of Lebanon’s southernmost port of Tyre at daybreak, searched houses for arms and questioned about 60 men, said Timor Goksel, spokesman for the U.N. peacekeeping force in Lebanon.

The U.N. Security Council, meanwhile, agreed to a six-month extension of the U.N. force’s mandate in Lebanon.